Apple Reportedly Agrees to 100% Price Hike on Samsung Memory Chips

[Spike1999]

This will be a precursor for Apple making their own memory.

 

[Delivered]

Apple

Why? What would apple do better? Even wafers are more expensive, and it is a huge investment where it wouldn't be clear what the benefit is until these extreme conditions.
And even these conditions, Apple doesn't really need to care.

A famously bad take. Running a fab for just yourself is a mistake AMD realized that and sold. Intel is learning that and trying to change the business model. This is like telling apple to start their own aluminum mine. 🤣

 

[Delivered]

This will be a precursor for Apple making their own memory.

Not unless it would enable them to do something unique.

 

[zarmanto]

... This is like telling apple to start their own aluminum mine. 🤣

Apple is probably more vertically integrated than most of their competitors at this point -- with the possible exception of Samsung, ironically. And as you allude, vertical integration does indeed have it's reasonable limits. Whether or not Apple can be said to have already reached those limits... well, really only Apple can say.

 

[Falco McGregor]

The details of this story are almost pointless if we don’t know how long the contract goes for. Apple paying 100% more for memory for just a single run of iPhones is very different than Apple agreeing to that hike to lock-in pricing during a volatile long-term period. Either way, consumers are going to feel these component hikes, not just with smartphones, but with cars and everything else downstream that requires ram, chips, etc.

 

[xmarcuswildx]

Damn only 13% of $1T instead of 16% (I know that’s not their revenue) just pointing this ******** out like it really hurts them. Would someone think of the board?

 

[xmarcuswildx]

The details of this story are almost pointless if we don’t know how long the contract goes for. Apple paying 100% more for memory for just a single run of iPhones is very different than Apple agreeing to that hike to lock-in pricing during a volatile long-term period. Either way, consumers are going to feel these component hikes, not just with smartphones, but with cars and everything else downstream that requires ram, chips, etc.

Yeah it’s like we just didn’t do this and it didn’t send prices and inflation sky rocketing.

 

[stevet]

Actual consumer spot pricing has gone up 4 or 5X. Try buying a 8GB DDR5 SODIMM and compare with prices a year ago. The 100% increase is nothing.

We’re also not buying the volume that Apple buys. That matters.

 

[Zdigital2015]

So the consumer as usual ends up paying the bill.

And has for the sum of recorded history, sir and/or madame.

 

[boswald]

Jobs hired Sculley too.

At least Steve admitted the mistake:

“What can I say? I hired the wrong guy.”

 

[S.B.G]

I wonder if they even attempted to negotiate the price or simply took whatever Samsung was shoving.

 

[throAU]

They don’t really have a choice here.

They either sign up to pay 2x today, or get no memory until they re-negotiate at maybe 3x, 4x, or whatever - there’s no sign of this shortage abating until at least 2027-2028 or possibly later. This isn’t an apple problem, its a tech industry problem.

My small site edge server prices for example have gone up 200-300% since august last year due to component shortages. these aren’t masssive boxes - 4-8TB SSD and 128GB of RAM.

And not just one supplier - they’re all seeing similar increases. Competitive quotes from both DELL and HPE - same story.

 

[ZeromusZeromus]

Apple’s margins are famously tiny so there’s no way the billions they have in the bank can absorb this hardship. Thoughts and prayers. 😀

 

[Tig_one]

It'll get forwarded to customers so it's negligible to Apple.

 

[Plutonius]

When is the bubble going to burst?

By bubble bursting, do you mean a dramatic reduction to the old pricing ?

There will come a time when the pricing stabilizes and probably even start to go down somewhat but, I doubt that we will ever see the old lower memory prices again 🙁.

 

[timber]

I suspect that one thing this tells us is that Samsung could have gone higher... but their people apparently didn't realize that. Prior to negotiations, Apple had obviously already done their own internal analysis of how much of a price increase they could sustain, and when Samsung came at them with a number lower than that threshold... it abruptly became a very short conversation.

This is of course still technically a "win" for Samsung... but perhaps not nearly as much of a win as they could have realized, if they had done a better job on their homework up front. And that makes it also a win for Apple.

I think Samsung didn't knew that? They preferred to keep Apple as a customer.

 

[JulianL]

When is the bubble going to burst?

... and it will be interesting to see what happens if/when it does.

If it's a while before the bubble bursts then if/when it does might that be at a stage when memory suppliers have had enough time to implement a very significant ramp in production capacity to feed as much as they can into the bubble? If yes then will the memory market switch over to a phase where there is significant over-supply due to that ramp up in production capacity potentially resulting in massive price drop, essentially an over-correction in pricing at least for a while?

And if that happens will Apple then pass those savings along to its customers? (Where's a flying pig emoji when you need one?)

 

[Big_D]

Actual consumer spot pricing has gone up 4 or 5X. Try buying a 8GB DDR5 SODIMM and compare with prices a year ago. The 100% increase is nothing.

I've been looking at new laptops and servers for work. Laptops were 760€ in October 2025, now they are over 1,000€.

I bought 6 dual Xeon Gold servers with 1TB RAM and 2 60TB SANs at the same time, we have a new project coming up, the new servers, single Xeon Gold, 512GB RAM and 1 40TB SAN. The servers with half the specification cost 40% more than those in October and the SAN is 20% more expensive! Even the storage switches have gone up around 50% in price.

 

[DougiePhresh]

Why would Apple negotiate? They are just going to pass this price increase directly though to the consumer (probably also throwing in a margin increase for themselves while they are at it) and people are going to still gobble iPhones up as fast as they can be manufactured.

 

[vegetassj4]

so now, Apple will only make a 200% margin on memory upgrades. Have mercy, won't someone please think of Tim Apple's yearly bonus?

 

[Jamie0003]

So much for the ram price thing not affecting Apple

 

[H.E. Pennypacker]

Tim Cook cares about company revenue

Steve Jobs cared about quality products

Steve didn’t care about company revenue? Steve Jobs. The billionaire owner of a $120 million dollar yacht? Ok.

 

[abowlby]

Tim Cook cares about company revenue

Steve Jobs cared about quality products

Are you under the impression that Apple was building RAM for the iPhone in-house when Steve Jobs was CEO?

 

[CATiNTHESTORE]

Oh boy, iPhone 18 won't cheap this year 😆

Every single hardware would not be cheap which use ddr vram ssd etc - so basically all tech industry, even your washing machine

 

[iMac The Knife]

As if Apple didn't already over charge for their RAM upgrades...